Posts Tagged ‘feminism’

I realize it’s almost heretical for a female to even consider that feminism might not be all it’s cracked up to be, but maybe the time has come for those of us who remember what we’ve lost to pass those memories on to this generation.

Before you start in on me, I’m not against women being paid the same for doing the same job as a man. I’m not against women having careers or doing work that used to be classified as “men only.”

But the feminism we see today has warped the way all of us view the term woman. While I admit, not everyone grew up like I did, surrounded by men who valued women and believed it was honorable to respect them, but those of us who remember that type of treatment shouldn’t let die-hard feminists bully us into forgetting what this current brand of feminism has stolen from us.

I remember the days when a man stood up when a lady entered a room, when he tipped his hat in respect when a woman walked by, when he opened doors, paid for meals, walked on the traffic side of the sidewalk, when saying no gave a woman honor instead of labeling her as a prude. Sadly, this fervor for equality has stolen this type of respect for women in our society.

If you’re from my generation (50-something), you’ll likely remember the old TV show, Gomer Pyle, USMC. You also probably remember the time when men treated women as something special. If you’re less than 50, the episode mentioned below can show you what you’re now missing because of today’s version of feminism. It clearly shows what the feminists of today eschew and, because of their own hatred of all things feminine, have stolen from all of us females. This type of respect and honor is how men used to treat women. Why wouldn’t any woman want a man to treat her like this? Have we cut off our nose to spite our face?

If you recall in the post, Substance Vs. Role, I discussed how God created men and women equal in substance but different in role and how it was intended as a good way of establishing an order to families. As humans, though, we have an inborn nature to rebel against the God who created us and a desire to do things our own way, so it shouldn’t surprise any of us that over the centuries, Mankind distorted this God-given concept of different roles.

We’ve seen some men abuse their roles of the family’s CEO, accountable directly to Jesus Christ who is head over us all, by mistreating the women and children entrusted to their care.

In the late 19th century, we saw a wave of feminism sweep over the United States that resulted in suffrage and a movement toward political equality for women. Since that time, feminism has continued to push for equality in social, cultural, and financial areas.

Or so feminism claims.

In reality, the feminism we see today is not interested in equality. It’s interested in superiority over men. As with most counter movements, the original intention is no longer enough, and the push is for more of an extreme in a type of retribution for the atrocities done to women over the centuries.

Many feminists believe they cannot gain their rightful place without dragging down men. They base their understanding of the situation on power, which is a finite commodity. Power is limited, with only a certain amount available for anyone to tap into. With this line of thinking, the only way to gain power is to take it from someone else. In this case, women can only achieve more power by taking power from the dominant sex, men.

However, power is not the issue. It’s a matter of respect.

Power has to do with role, but respect deals with substance. Men and women don’t have the same role in our society so there’s always going to be an inequality of power. Taking power from one will only shift the inequality the other way. A CEO, by definition of the role, has power. Switching out CEOs will not change that power; it only shifts it to someone else. So stripping men of their power will only shift that power to women—whose hearts are equally sinful to men’s. It only changes one sin-distorted leader for another and does nothing to solve the problem except to move further from God’s intended order.

Respect, on the other hand, targets the substance. Both men and women were created in God’s image, and that makes us equal in our substance. It also requires us to equally respect that substance in one another. Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (NIV) We are of the same substance, one in Christ Jesus.

The beauty of respect is that it’s an infinite commodity, with no limits as to how much of it can exist in our world. You don’t need to take respect from someone else to gain more respect for yourself. In fact, the more respect you withhold from others, the less respect others will give you.

When we see that respect for equal substance is at the heart of the equality problem, we realize that the more we raise up one gender with respect, the more the other gender will also raise. In other words, for women to be more respected in our society, men also have to be more respected as well. Disrespect for either gender will result in less respect for both.

This brings me to my topic for today, misandry in the commercials we see. Commercials are designed to work on an unconscious basis. Few people sit and watch commercials with their minds fully engaged. Instead, we normally give them little attention with our conscious mind, but our subconscious picks up on the message the advertiser intends. Advertising messages are often subtle and crafted especially for a specific audience.

Take a look at these commercials and notice how men are portrayed:

The men in many commercials today are portrayed as animals, slobs, oafs, idiots, immature, and even barbarians. If feminism is truly about equality for the sexes, why isn’t there a huge outrage at how men are being portrayed these days? If it’s wrong to portray a woman as an animal or a slob or an idiot, then it’s wrong to portray a man in the same light. There can’t be a double-standard if we’re truly about equality. Equality requires both sexes to be equally respected, even in a 30-second advertising spot.

The most insidious thing about such advertising is that it works on our subconscious and permeates our mind in a way we’re not even aware of because our conscious mind isn’t in the filtering mode. Mind control techniques count on your conscious mind filter to be down to get their message through to you.

The next time a commercial comes on, think about what message they’re portraying about men and women. Is it a message that shows equal respect for the sexes? Or is one sex portrayed as inferior to the other? Of course, an isolated instance might not mean much, but when you see as many as in the above video (and there are a lot more that could have been included), there’s a definite pattern—and it’s not a respect for men.